Sunday 14 October 2012

Hard-Boiled! Studies of Raymond Chandler's Work on Screen

Frame grab from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Read Jonathan  Rosenbaum's essay on this film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you the second of three posts devoted to online resources provided by the staff of the fantastic Film Studies department at Queen Mary, University of London. On this occasion, the resource is a two part video of an excellent, illustrated lecture by Adrian Wootton on the screen adaptations of Chandler's work, including ones the writer scripted himself.

This time, FSFF adds value to the videos with its own presentation of a terribly hard-boiled list of links to online scholarly studies of Raymond Chandler's work and its screen adaptations.


On December 3rd 2009, Adrian Wootton, then Chief Executive of the BFI (now CEO of Film London), visited Queen Mary, University of London, to give a talk on Raymond Chandler on screen.
Click on the links below to access QuickTime video files of the event.


Wootten 2 poster frame

2 comments:

Joel Bocko said...

Great topic. It's fascinating to discern what was changed, and why, in the various Chandler adaptations. In a way, Leigh Brackett's, who penned not only the iconic Big Sleep but also the iconoclastic Long Goodbye, was a peculiar choice as Chandler's cinematic interpreter; she dismissed many of the books' most effective developments and themes. The movies are great examples of sharp style and inventive storytelling (or more precisely, conveyance of mood) on the screen but they do lose some qualities from Chandler's literature.

I wrote about Chandler and the screen twice this spring:

http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2012/06/spade-marlowe-private-eyes-maltese.html


http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2012/05/long-goodbye.html

Steve Bennison said...

This is great - really useful. Thanks.

Here's three blog essays I found on The Big Sleep

http://andrewsidea.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/the-big-sleep/

http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/615-big-sleep.html

http://filmexpression.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/big-sleep-1946.html